Any fan of “underground” comic artist Robert Crumb knows that the man has no shyness about his preferences: not in jazz music, not in politics, and certainly not in the female form. Alex Wood, co-operator of the official R. Crumb site (pictured with Crumb above), has discovered that the artist’s opinions offer a vivid window into the artist’s mind.

“Over the years, talking with Robert about many different things, I’ve been surprised by some of the things he likes and dislikes,” Wood writes. “We all know he loves old music from the early part of the last century, and doesn’t like rock music. But then he says he likes Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? So in a discussion in May, 2011, I asked his opinion on a list of people in the news past and present.”

This became part one of the series “Crumb on Others,” which has at this point grown to seven full pages.

Below, we offer you a selection of the roughly 150 figures from music, film, visual art, and letters Crumb has so far assessed, his reactions ranging from high praise to outright dismissal to amusing anecdotes of his own encounters with the luminaries in question.
With these, you can see how your notes on the likes of Bob Dylan, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick, and Charles Darwin compare with those of the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, the hand that gave us “Keep on Truckin‘,” and the leading light of of Zap Comix — a luminary who has generated no small amount of high praise, outright dismissal, and amusing anecdote himself.

On The Beatles: “Some of the last stuff they did, you know, it kind of gets dark,
and that’s more interesting to me, the last stuff they did before they broke up.
Well, that and the music they did before they actually started recording under Brian
Epstein. The only way you can hear that, I think, is to see the documentaries where
it shows them playing in Hamburg and the Cavern Club.

Before Brian Epstein got ahold of them and cleaned them up and made them over
into those cute mop-tops and put them in those mod suits. Before that, they were
greaser guys – leather jackets and greasy hair. And they just played this sort of
driving, hard rock-a-billy music. And they were really good at that.”

Over the years, talking with Robert about many different things, I've been surprised by some of the things he likes and dislikes. We all know he loves old music from the early part of the last century, and doesn't like rock music. But then he says he likes Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? So in a discussion in May, 2011, I asked his opinion on a list of people in the news past and present.

I intend to continue with this article in more parts to come. We have plenty of names still to cover, but if you'd like to suggest additions, please e-mail your suggestions to tom@rcrumb.com. We can't promise that we will get to all of them, but we will add them to the list for future interviews.

-- Alex Wood, Wildwood Serigraphs

THE BEATLES

Robert: "Beatles? [heavy sigh] You know, back in the day, back in the '60s, I was involved in this group of people, this subculture, who just listened to the Beatles – Sgt. Peppers and that stuff – all the time. We used to get high and listen to it and Sgt. Peppers seemed deep and everything, but I can’t listen to it now. Just can’t listen to it.

Some of the last stuff they did, you know, it kind of gets dark, and that’s more interesting to me, the last stuff they did before they broke up. And even the stuff John Lennon did after they broke up is interesting to me. Well, that and the music they did before they actually started recording under Brian Epstein. The only way you can hear that, I think, is to see the documentaries where it shows them playing in Hamburg and the Cavern Club.

Before Brian Epstein got ahold of them and cleaned them up and made them over into those cute mop-tops and put them in those mod suits. Before that, they were greaser guys – leather jackets and greasy hair. And they just played this sort of driving, hard rock-a-billy music. And they were really good at that. That style was popular in England in the late '50s and early '60s, that rock-a-billy sound. There were a bunch of good rock-a-billy bands there, as good as the American ones."

Alex: "But we were talking about the Beatles about a year ago and you said, 'If you take their songs apart, you’ll see they’re well-crafted songs.'"

Robert: "Oh they are, yeah. They’re well written songs."

Alex: "Pretty amazing considering how young they were, putting those songs together at the rate they did."

Robert: "Two of those guys were very gifted composers of songs, McCartney and Lennon, both of them. But the Beatles, they became a plague, you just couldn’t escape it. Wherever you went, public address systems, either the original versions or the Muzak versions [sings Eleanor Rigby in the most irritating way possible]. Oh please!
But Aline loves the Beatles. She’s very nostalgic about them. Sometimes she plays Beatle records or sometimes Beatle CDs in the car. [laughs]"

Robert: "Sad case, very sad case. She tried to act like she was hard and tough, but she wasn’t at all. She was soft and vulnerable. She drank a lot, and got a lot of bad advice. She was surrounded by vultures and vampires and scoundrels, and they just did her in. She finally ended up face-down in her own vomit alone in some hotel room; too much heroin and alcohol, 27 years old."

Alex: "You once said, “Fame is what killed Janis Joplin."

Robert: "Yep, it did. Fame killed her. She couldn’t handle it. It was awful. The last time I saw her alive she had just bought this big fancy redwood mansion somewhere in Marin County. She had this big housewarming party and she invited me and Wilson. So we show up and there are hundreds of people there. And I didn’t even get to talk to her because, guess why? Because she had this circle of people around her that was impenetrable. A circle around her so tight, I could only stand on my toes and wave to her and she waved back and that was it. That was the last time I saw her.

"Gilbert Shelton knew her when she was completely obscure in Texas, when she was still singing old time music. She was great at that! Gilbert played these tapes for me once of Janis singing with this country band, and it fit perfectly with her style, I thought. Because she’s a real redneck shouter, you know. But much later, after Big Brother and Holding Company, I think she was getting some bad advice in the music industry. They wanted her to sound more like, you know, Aretha Franklin, or I don’t know, somehow more sophisticated and black or something. But she still screamed and hollered because that’s what the audience liked. And she really wrecked her voice doing that.

"When I first met Janis in the spring or summer of 1968, she was already a big deal in the Bay Area, I don’t know about the rest of the country. But it was easy to be around her. She was a regular gal, you know, and she was kinda homely. I mean, I was always extremely intimidated by beautiful women, and since Janis was like this plain, regular gal, she wasn’t intimidating to be around at all. I didn’t see her all that much.

She liked to drink too much, and get high too much. She hung around this group of girls – not when I first met her, but like a year or so later – this group of women who were really hard-assed and scary. They sort of attached themselves to her and they were into, you know, hard partying and drinking. They were sort of rough and tough and challenging, a little bit feminist but with a tough girl attitude. Like, ‘What can you show me? What kind of man are you? Can you out-drink me? I bet you can’t. I bet you’re just a pussy.’ That kind of thing. They were kind of intimidating.

There was this one girl named Sunshine. She was a hard case. Another one named Pattycakes. [laughs] And Janis had this other friend who was kind of her bodyguard, this big girl who looked rather masculine, but she was the nicest one actually. She was sort of Janis's valet after she got famous. But these people just attached themselves to Janis like leeches. But that's what happens when people get famous. And Janis, she was kind of innocent, she didn’t know what was going on completely.

She was young and naive, insecure and all that stuff. But you had to like her because she was very vulnerable kind of person. Not a tough person really. But you know, like I said, she tried to act tough, but she really wasn’t. But those other people around her, they were tough, hard cases; hustlers, hangers-on, opportunists."

The pig thing all began because at that point in time I felt that rock ‘n’ roll was taking itself much too seriously. It was getting pretty pretentious (it was the peak of the Prog Rock era). I thought I’d puncture those ego balloons with a few well-placed pig caricatures (because the symbol of TMOQ was a dictionary image of a pig).

It was meant to be subversive. It was done with the hope that pop stars might reexamine themselves a bit and re-find a way to laugh at themselves and not take themselves so seriously.
I promised Ollie of Record Paradise, though, that I would never draw Mick Jagger as a pig. She loved Mick, who used to visit the shop whenever he was in L. A. When he came by, Ollie would load him up with our bootlegs. I did a lot of drawings of Mick (the TMOQ guys were huge Stones fans) but I kept that promise of never drawing him as a pig.

I felt bad about drawing Yoko Ono as a pig (Get Back Sessions II); she was already getting more than her share of shit from Beatles fans. I heard later that she loved my notorious BeatleSongs cover, the one that featured Mark Chapman on the cover, the cover that got me and Rhino Records all of those death threats.

I drove back to my apartment and began work on the cover. I re-titled it “All Meat Music” and designed the cover as a tribute to Robert Crumb’s Cheap Thrills cover for Big Brother & The Holding Company. Each song got a picture and each of the five Stones were featured in song illustrations.